Why can’t the stormtroopers in Star Wars shoot straight?

[Zelena]

A Guardian article by Rich Pelley…

My opinion is a long tradition of bad guys unable to shoot straight and good guys miraculously able to make it through until the words “The end” appear on the screen.

[BeastieRunner]

I remember that Dark Forces and the pre-D20 Star Wars RPG had retconned in the fact that Stormtroopers after the completion of the first Death Star were using the BlasTech E-11, which while more powerful than the E-10, was made for close quarters situations due to it's inaccuracy.

[Robotech Master]

Rebels had the characters complain that they couldn't see well out of the Stormtrooper helmets and experienced accuracy decrease while undercover as Stormtroopers. I think Rex may have even said something about them having inferior visibility to the clone trooper helmets or something. So there is a suggestion of poor HUD in their trooper helmets.

[SuperiorIronman]

Stormtrooper aim being bad is just a misunderstanding of what happened in the OT.

They intentionally missed so they could force the heroes to flee and follow them to Yavin-4. Otherwise they decimated Echo Base and nobody really gave a **** about the fleeing heroes on Bespin because Vader is only here for Luke whom he was dealing with personally, so the Stormtroopers either kill or draw them away. Then in ROTJ they still get good hits in even though they will loose the battle. It's a blatant misunderstanding of them in the OT not helped because Filoni keeps bringing this up and frankly not helped because his team are really bad at writing villains.

Funny note about the armor though since I actually own replicas of these.

An OT stormtrooper can have bubble lenses or flat lenses. Bubble lenses are awful and it's good to see these largely ditched in the Disney era. They're terrible to see out of which may have actually been what Luke was complaining about (Mark Hamil and Harrison Ford used Hero helmets with the bubbles). OT helmets are also asymmetrical which led to a kind of technique to put the thing on which is a sort of twist. Not doing this would also result in not being able to see a thing. This is because the helmet was put on wrong and your eye was in the wrong spot. I don't know if this was fixed for ESB or ROTJ but the Mark 2 stormtrooper used for ESB and ROTJ was considered far comfier than the originals.
Hilariously though neither the Stormtrooper or clone is actually able to sit down due to physical constraints of wearing the armor either injuring the wearer or it actually bending which you can see is happening to Harrison Ford in ANH. So anytime you see a clone or Stormtrooper sit, it's bullshit. Clones also lose a ton of vision basically with not being able to look down and losing peripheral vision. So clone vision has and can actually get worse with different helmets.

[ChrisIII]

I think it's still canon that as the Empire got further away from the Clone Wars and the Republic, they sort of had a 'quantity over quality' kind of philosophy with a lot of the mass produced equipment.

[Vegeta]

Why is this considered such a problem only in the Star Wars universe and not any other popular franchise? I mean the criminal underworld in Gotham City can't ever seem to hit Batman, but no one makes a big stink about how terribly ineffective they are at their jobs. Seriously, crime families shouldn't even exist in that universe if the gangsters they employ can't kill one flamboyantly dressed man.

Maybe because it's fiction and the story ends prematurely if the protagonists die in the first act?

[Powerboy]

A Guardian article by Rich Pelley…

My opinion is a long tradition of bad guys unable to shoot straight and good guys miraculously able to make it through until the words “The end” appear on the screen.

I think that sums up the real world reasons.

[Powerboy]

Some captions I did for FB a while back. The Dark Side of the Force made me do it.
'
Star Worries 3.jpgStar Worries 2.jpgStar Worries.jpg

[ChrisIII]

First one kind of reminds me a bit of the Kylo Ren/"Matt" SNL skit.

[Powerboy]

First one kind of reminds me a bit of the Kylo Ren/"Matt" SNL skit.

LOL. Never saw the skit. Just made it up a ways back to post on FB.

[Tom Kalbfus]

A Guardian article by Rich Pelley…

My opinion is a long tradition of bad guys unable to shoot straight and good guys miraculously able to make it through until the words “The end” appear on the screen.

Stormtroopers can't shoot straight because of bad writing. You ever see a World War II movie? In a good one, you don't know who is going to die. You don't have heroes wading into battle killing hordes of enemy soldiers that can't shoot straight. You need to have a bunch of disposable characters to keep the audience guess about who us going to die, you don't get that sense from watching a Star Wars Movie, Stormtroopers wear masks and helmets to keep them as faceless cannon fodder.

[Zelena]

You need to have a bunch of disposable characters to keep the audience guess about who us going to die, you don't get that sense from watching a Star Wars Movie, Stormtroopers wear masks and helmets to keep them as faceless cannon fodder.

It’s the interest of movies or TV shows with a lot of main protagonists: we don’t identify ourselves with one character who, we know, isn’t (usually) going to die…

It annoys me, too: the masked enemies… It gives the impression you don’t shoot real people but some robots.
It gives to heroes an easy moral ascendancy: we are good because we look human, they are bad because they look like machines (and you can’t kill machines). Except that, under the armor, they are human. It’s because of that I like very much the thing with Finn.

[Pinsir]

The same thing does happen in Star Trek, but they always got a few red shirts to get hit and when main characters do get shot, they got space magic to heal them.

[ChrisIII]

It’s the interest of movies or TV shows with a lot of main protagonists: we don’t identify ourselves with one character who, we know, isn’t (usually) going to die…

It annoys me, too: the masked enemies… It gives the impression you don’t shoot real people but some robots.
It gives to heroes an easy moral ascendancy: we are good because we look human, they are bad because they look like machines (and you can’t kill machines). Except that, under the armor, they are human. It’s because of that I like very much the thing with Finn.

Finn's a bit different from the OT Stormtroopers though; while the PT ones are clones and the OT ones are recruits, the ST ones like Finn are pretty much trained and indoctrinated from a young age (Pretty much a warped version of the Jedi's procedure). I think it's implied that the few that defected like Finn and Jannah were able to do so with the force guiding them to do the right thing.

[Starter Set]

You wouldn't shoot straight either with that kind of helmet on your head.

The whole armor is ridiculous anyway. Heavy, clumsy, pointless apparently as you can one shot them just the same and it turns you into a quite visible and easy to shoot at target.

+1 for the style, -1000 for everything else.

Plus, it must be a mess tactically speaking. How do you even recognize the dudes from you own units? Can't be practical.

Rebels now? You can see the faces of your pals, thank you very much, lighty armored for faster movements, they can aim without killing their own neck cause of a stupid helm and they don't wear flashy colors.

GG.